Death and Immortality

Friday, March 06, 2015

Life prepares us for death whether we prepare or not. One way it does so is by weaning us of any over-estimation of the significance of the things of this world. For this weaning to take effect, however, one must take care to grow old. Disillusionment takes time. The passage of time, and plenty of it, will reliably reduce both the number of things that matter and the degree of the mattering of those that remain to matter.

Ageing may therefore be recommended as a way to wisdom, though it be a narrow gate thereto, trodden by few, the rest serving to show that there is no fool like an old fool.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens. He's dead. In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

A ninety year old woman died in her home in Auburn. She had decomposed through the floor before she was found six months later. The diaries found in her belongings shed light on this lonely and brilliant mind. Watch the documentary above, and read further excerpts from her diaries below.

Sunday, August 03, 2014

And so they compose 'bucket lists' of things to do before they 'kick the bucket.' It's as if, on the sinking Titanic, one were to try to make the most of the ship and its features and amenities instead of considering how one might survive the coming calamity.

"There are a lot of things I want to do before we sink. I've never been to the captain's quarters or inspected the engine room or admired the gold fixtures in the first-class cabins or had a drink in the VIP lounge."

The worldly too know that life is short but they draw the wrong conclusion from the fact.

Friday, June 06, 2014

On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal. And so are you. But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body. The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.) Assume that I die peacefully in my bed. I went to bed, but now I don't exist: what occupies my place in the bed is a (human) corpse. A dramatic change took place in the immediate vicinity of the bed. One and the same human body went from alive to dead. This suggests that dying is an accidental as opposed to a substantial change. If I understand it, this is roughly the Corpse Objection to animalism. The objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. Me and my body have different persistence conditions.

But there is another way to look at the situation. Me and my body have the same persistence conditions. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die, the animal body that I am ceases to exist and one or more new bodies begin to exist. (If my death is peaceful, as opposed to, say, 'Islamic,' then only one new body begins to exist.) So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Patrick Toner puts it:

Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. ("Hylemorphic Animalism" in Phil Stud, 155, 2011, pp. 65-81)

An Objection

This strikes me as problematic. Suppose dying is a substantial change and that Peter and Paul die peacefully at the same instant in the same place. Peter and Paul cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 begin to exist. Suppose C1 is Peter's corpse and C2 is Paul's corpse. What accounts metaphysically for C1's being Peter's corpse and opposed to Paul's, and vice versa? What makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's?

Why should there be a problem? Dying is a substantial change, but it is not annihilation. (At the other end, being born is a substantial change but it is not exnihilation: no animal is born ex nihilo.) Since dying is not annihilation, a corpse comes to be when Peter dies. And since the change is substantial, not accidental, the substance Peter ceases to exist and a numerically different substance, C1, begins to exist. Now every change is a change in a substratum or subject. So what is the subject of the change when Peter dies? Answer: prime matter, materia prima. This is what all the scholastic manuals tell me.

But if prime matter underlies substantial change, and provides the continuity between Peter and his corpse, then, given that prime matter is wholly indeterminate and bare of all forms, substantial and accidental, the continuity that prime matter allows does not distinguish between the change from Peter to Peter's corpse and the change from Paul to Paul's corpse. The substratum of these two changes is the same, namely, prime matter. If so, what makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's? That's my problem.

This problem does not arise if dying is an accidental change. For then we can say that Peter's designated matter (materia signata quantitate) which is numerically distinct from Paul's continues in existence as Peter's corpse. We have an accidental change, a change from being alive to being dead in a particular parcel of designated matter.

Toner's Reply

Patrick Toner's reply is that designated, not prime, matter accounts for the different continuities. Peter's corpse is continuous with Peter because the same designated matter is present in Peter and his corpse, but a different parcel of designated matter is present in Paul and his corpse. The fact that the matter underlying the two changes is prime, however, does not prevent the matter from also being designated. Toner in effect rejects my assumption that the substratum of a substantial change cannot be a particular parcel of designated matter.

What I had gathered from the manuals (e.g. Feser's, p. 171 et passim) was that (i) materia prima is the subject of substantial change; (ii) materia secunda is the subject of accidental change; (iii) every change is either substantial or accidental; (iv) no change is both; (v) no change is such that its subject or substrate is both materia prima and materia secunda.

But if Toner is right, I am wrong about (v).

Toner draws on Joseph Bobik's commentary on De Ente et Essentia:

When we talk about quantified matter ... we are not talking about anything other than the matter which is part of the intrinsic constitution of an individual composed substance, that matter which can also be described as prime, as designated, and as nondesignated... Thus, to talk about prime matter, quantified matter, nondesignated matter, and designated matter is to talk about the same thing, but to say four different things about it, to describe it in four different ways. To speak of quantified matter, or perhaps better of matter as quantified, is to speak of what the matters of all individual composed substances have in common, namely, that in their matters which accounts for the possibility of their matter's being divided from the matters of other individual substances; it is to speak of that which makes it possible for individual composed substances to have matter in common as part of their essence. Matter as designated presupposes, and adds to, matter as quantified; and what it adds is actual circumscription so as to be just so much. To say that matter is quantified is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out, and nothing else. To say that matter is designated is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out and circumscribed to be just so much, just so much as is in Jack or Paul or any given individual composed substance. (148, emphasis added)

Response to the Reply

The Bobik passage implies that some one thing can be described in two different ways, as designated matter and as prime matter. But then what is the one thing that can be described in these two ways? Presumably, it is a particular parcel of designated matter, the matter of precisely Peter, say, which is numerically distinct from the matter of precisely Paul. Materia signata is matter in the concrete, and prime matter would then be an abstraction from it and from every discrete parcel of designated matter.

If prime matter is but an abstraction, how can it serve as the real substratum of any such real change as is the dying of an animal? That is a real, concrete, change. If every change is a change in something, then the something must itself be real and concrete and particular. That's one problem.

A second is that if both substantial and accidental changes are changes in a concrete parcel of designated matter, then what becomes of the distinction between substantial and accidental changes? Can every change be viewed as one or the other? Is it just a matter of the same change being described in two different ways?

This requires further development and in any case it is just the beginning of the aporetics of prime matter, something to be pursued in subsequent entries.

Conclusion

Given the extreme difficulty of the notion of prime matter, a difficulty that transfers to the notion of substantial change, I don't see that the objection I raise above has yet been adequately answered.

Friday, May 30, 2014

Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons. Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism. A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and (2) human persons are identical with animals." (67)

Animalism

Let's consider the second claim. Toner endorses Eric Olson's 'thinking animal' argument for (2). Based on Toner's summary, I take the argument to go as follows. I am now sitting in a chair thinking a thought T. There is also now an animal sitting in this very chair and occupying the same space. Is the animal also thinking T? There are four possibilities.

a. I am identical to the animal occupying my chair, and the thinker of my thoughts is identical to this animal.

b. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with an animal that thinks all my thoughts.

c. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal.

d. There is no animal in my chair; hence I am not not identical to it.

Of the four possibilities, Toner considers (a) to be actual. "It's the least ugly of the choices. Indeed, it's positively common-sensical, compared with the other rather nutty options." (70)

I agree that (b) and (d) can be excluded right away. But I don't see that (c) is 'nutty' and I don't see that (a) is "positively common-sensical." Common sense has nothing to say about abstruse metaphysical topics such as this one.

The Corpse Objection to Animalism

On (a), the thinker of my thoughts is numerically identical to this living human organsm with which I am intimately associated. But If I am (identically) my body, then me and my body ought to have the same persistence conditions. But they don't: when I die I will cease to exist, but (most likely) a corpse will remain. Now if a = b, then there is no time t at which a exists but b does not exist, and vice versa. So if there are times when I do not exist but my body does exist, then I cannot be identical to my body. On (a), I will not survive death, but my body will: it will survive as a corpse. Therefore I am not identical to my body.

Toner's Response to the Corpse Objection

The Corpse Objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. My body exists now before my death and it will exist then after my death. It is the same body dead or alive. Toner's response is a flat denial of survival. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die the animal body that I am will cease to exist and one or more new bodies will begin to exist. So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Toner puts it:

Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. (71)

Two Questions

1. One question is whether, assuming that I am just this living animal body, my dying is an accidental change or a substantial change. I will suggest that it is more plausible to think of it as an accidental change.

If my dying is an accidental change, then something that exists now in one form will exist post mortem in a different form. This something could be called the proximate matter of my body. This matter is organized in a certain way and its organs and various subsystems are functioning in such a way that the entire bodily system has the property of being alive. (For example, the lungs are oxygenating the blood, the heart is pumping the blood to the brain, the pathways to the brain are unobstructed, etc.) But then suppose I drown or have a massive heart attack or a massive stroke. The body then ceases to have the property of being alive. On this way of looking at things, one and the same body can exist in two states, alive and dead. There is diachronic continuity between the living and dead bodies, and that continuity is grounded in the proximate matter of the body.

If, on the other hand, my dying is a substantial change, and I am just this living body, then at death I cease to exist entirely, and what is left over, my corpse, is something entirely new, 'an addition to being' so to speak. I cease to exist, and a corpse comes to exist. But then the only diachronic continuity as between the live body and the corpse is prime (not proximate) matter.

But what makes the corpse that comes to exist my corpse? Suppose I am just a living animal and that I die at t1. A moment later, at t2, two corpses come into existence. Which one do you bury under the 'BV' tombstone? Which is the right one, and what makes it the right one? Or suppose Peter and I die at the same instant, in the same place, and that dying is a substantial change. Peter and I cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 come into existence. Which is my corpse and which is Peter's? Practically, there is no problem: we look different and our looking different and having different dimensions, etc. is due to our different proximate matter, matter that is the same under two different and successive forms.

What this suggests is that dying is an accidental change, not a substantial change. It is an accidental change in the proximate matter of a human body. But if so, then the Corpse Objection holds and animalism is untenable.

There is also the very serious problem that substantial change requires prime matter, and prime matter is a very questionable posit. But I won't pursue this topic at present.

2. My second main question concerns how animalism is compatible with such phenomena as the unity of consciousness and intentionality. On animalism I am just a living human animal. The thinker of my thoughts is this hairy critter occupying my blogging chair. Is it the whole of me that is the res cogitans? Or only a proper part of me? Presumably the latter. If an animal thinks, then presumably it thinks in virtue of its brain thinking.

The animalist thus seems committed to the claim that the res cogitans, that which thinks my thoughts, is a hunk of living intracranial meat. But it is not so easy to understand how meat could mean. What a marvellous metabasis eis allo genos whereby meat gives rise to meaning, understanding, intentionality! It is so marvellous that it is inconceivable. My thinkings are of or about this or that, and in some cases they are of or about items that do not exist. I can think about Venus the planet and Venus the goddess and I can think about Vulcan even though there is no such planet. How can a meat state possess that object-directedness we call intentionality? Brains states are physical states, and our understanding of physical states is from physics; but the conceptuality of physics offers us no way of understanding the intentionality of thought.

And then there is the unity of consciousness. Can animalism account for it? At Plato's Theaetetus 184c, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that A. N. Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.

Conclusion

I tentatively conclude that option (c) above -- I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal -- is, if not preferable to Toner's preferred option, at least as good as it, and not at all "nutty.' The Corpse Objection to Animalism seems like a good one, and Toner's response to it is not compelling, involving as it does the idea that dying is a substantial change, a response that brings with it all the apories surrounding substance and prime matter. Finally, it is not clear to me how animalism can accommodate intentionality and the unity of consciousness.

Friday, May 09, 2014

My grandmother is on her deathbed. My mother flew out to Boston to be there with her when she dies. Of course my grandmother is putting up a good fight; however, they expected her to die yesterday. My mother had a conversation with her while she was lucid. She asked her, “Why are you fighting so hard? Do you fear something?”

My grandmother’s reply, “I fear that there is nothing on the other side.” Here is a woman who has spent eighty nine years of her life devoting herself to the [Catholic] church and her family. Now, when it comes down to death she is clinging on because her entire life is behind her and the only thing that she faces in front of her is the uncertainty of whether there is a heaven awaiting her in the coming days.

If you were there at my grandmother’s deathbed and she would convey to you her fears, what would you tell her?

I'm a philosopher, not a pastor, and what a dying nonphilosopher needs is pastoral care, not philosophical dialog. But if I were to play the pastor I would say something along the following lines.

"You have lived your long life faithfully and devotedly in the embrace of Holy Mother the Church. She has presided over central events in your life, your baptism, first communion, confirmation, and your marriage. She has provided guidance, moral instruction, comfort, and community as you have navigated life's difficulties and disappointments. She provided meaning and solace when your parents died, and your husband, and your many friends and relatives. If your faith was a living faith and not a convenience or a matter of social conformity, then from time to time you had your doubts. But through prayer and reflection you have repeatedly reaffirmed your faith. You faith was made deeper and truer by those doubts and their overcoming."

"I ask you now to recall those moments of calm reflection and existential lucidity, those moments when you were at your best physically, mentally, and spiritually. I ask you to recall them, and above all I ask you not to betray them now when you are weak. Do not allow the decisions and resolutions of your finest and and clearest hours to be taken hostage by doubts and fears born of weakness. Your weakness has called forth the most vicious attacks of the Adversary and his agents. You have lived in the faith and now you must remain true to a course of life judged right at the height of your powers. Your doubts are of the devil and they must be put aside. Pray, and remain true to a course judged right."

So that is what I would say to the old Irish Catholic woman on her deathbed. I would exhort her to remain true to a course judged right in the moments of her highest existential lucidity and to bring her life to a successful completion. The hour of death is not the time to grapple with the devil of doubt!

To myself and the others for whom the hora mortis is still a ways off, to those in the sunshine of their strength, physical and mental, I say the following. Now is the time to wrestle with doubts and either defeat them or succumb to them. Now is the time to get serious about The Last Things. It is far better to get serious about them before they get serious about you. Now is the time to face the reality of death without evasion and to prepare for a happy death. Now is the time to realize that you don't have all the time in the world, that as the Zen Master Dogen says, "Impermanence is swift." Now is the time to stop fooling yourself about how you are going to live forever. For "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 3, 14)

Monday, April 14, 2014

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself . . . .

Monday, March 17, 2014

A worthwhile NYT piece and a good counter to Susan Jacoby's Never Say Die which I criticize in one of my better posts, appropriately entitled Never Say Die. An excerpt from the former:

An impediment to wisdom is thinking, “I can’t stand who I am now because I’m not who I used to be,” said Isabella S. Bick, a psychotherapist who, at 81, still practices part time out of her home in Sharon, Conn. She has aging clients who are upset by a perceived worsening of their looks, their sexual performance, their physical abilities, their memory. For them, as for herself, an acceptance of aging is necessary for growth, but “it’s not a resigned acceptance; it’s an embracing acceptance,” she said.

“Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” Professor Ardelt said.

True, acceptance of reality is an ingredient in wisdom. But the distinction between resigned and embracing acceptance smacks of the bogus. Let's say you are 80+. You are now deep in the backcountry of old age. You must accept with equanimity the attendant deterioration. Whining will only make things worse and no one wants to hear it. You must set a good example. But how does one embrace the deterioration of one's physical and mental powers? That is a bit like physically embracing the skeleton that one will soon become.

I can think of only two ways to embrace one's deterioration, neither of them live options for the average reader of the Grey Lady. There are those who have had enough of this life and embrace deterioration as a means to its cessation. When Ludwig Wittgenstein learned that he had cancer, he said, "Good." And there are those who look beyond this life to a truer and better one. They are the mystics, the religious, and the true philosophers.

But if you are a non-nihilistic naturalist, someone who believes that this life is satisfactory as it is and worth living and that there is no other, then how the hell can you embrace the Buddha's triad of sickness, old age, and death? Besides, there would seem to be little point to the personal "growth" consequent upon "embracing" aging if one is soon to be snuffed out altogether.

Here is another excerpt:

True personal wisdom involves five elements, said Professor Staudinger, now a life span psychologist and professor at Columbia University. They are self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities.

That's pretty good except for the bit about priorities and values not being absolute.

Suppose you are about to eat an excellent dinner when you notice that a neighbor is being viciously assaulted in her front yard. Do you finish your dinner and then go to the assistance of your neighbor? First things first! I say that it is absolutely true, and absolutely evident, that your neighbor's health and well-being take priority over your delectation of an unnecessary meal.

Sunday, March 02, 2014

It may be that moral and intellectual progress is possible only here. After death it may be too late, either because one no longer exists, or because one continues to exist but in a state that does not permit further progress.

It is foolish to think that believers in post-mortem survival could have no reason to value their physical health and seek longevity. Even a Platonist who believes that he is his soul and not a composite of soul and body has reason to prolong the discipline of the Cave. For it may be that the best progress or the only progress is possible only in the midst of its speluncarchiaroscuro.

Philosophia longa, vita brevis. It is precisely because philosophy is long that one ought to extend one's earthly tenure for as long as one can make progress intellectually and morally. And this, whether or not one has the hope that Vita mutatur non tollitur.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Schadenfreude at the death of an enemy presupposes that being dead is an evil state of affairs. The decedent, however, might express, if he could, Schadenfreude of his own: "I have been released from all evils while you remain trapped."

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that it is highly probable, especially where the survival hypothesis is treated as a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis. So my objection is first and foremost a criticism of what I take to be unjustified claims regarding the posterior probability of the hypothesis of personal survival, that is, it’s net plausibility given the relevant empirical data and standard background knowledge. Consequently, the classical arguments, at least as traditionally formulated, do not provide a sufficiently robust epistemic justification for belief in personal survival. That’s my thesis.

Our friend Sudduth a couple of years ago made the journey to the East (to allude to a Hermann Hesse title). Thus he states elsewhere in the interview, "I am a Vedantin philosopher, so I certainly accept the idea of survival, at least broadly understood as the postmortem persistence of consciousness." I would have appreciated some clarification and elaboration on this point. I would guess that Michael now no longer believes in the survival of an individuated, personal consciousness, but believes instead in the survival of a pre-personal or impersonal consciousness common to all of us. But I am only guessing. I am aware, though, that one can be a Vedantin without being an Advaitin.

Friday, October 25, 2013

The following from Chapter 11 of Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last time in his life north on Highway 1 toward Monterey and San Francisco where he receives another 'sign':

The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in his expression -- When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead. "

Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother -- I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting -- He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me -- And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, 'Attends pour mue kitigingoo" -- But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! -- But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:

"Sunday 20 July 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is gone. Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no availe. He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till "day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket -- and at 7 A. M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of em flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest -- that's something I'll never forget -- I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow... I'm so sick not physically but heart sick... I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more -- and that I wont be seeing him come through his little "Shanty" or Walking through the green grass ... PS. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty -- as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real "God" -- Your old Mom XXXXXX."

So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore -- All the premonitions tying in together.

Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything) -- He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin -- Of course he cant know since I didn't tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk -- The death of "little brother" Tyke indeed -- Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks -- or are you just gonna get drunk again" -- "I'm gonna get drunk yes"

[. . .]

It was the most happy three weeks of my life [the three weeks at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby canyon] dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke -- You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico" -- "Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " -- "Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything" (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler [Ferlinghetti] even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us) -- I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there three thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

As
far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is
unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims
get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do
here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And
presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s.
You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being
sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the
greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous
delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary
sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only
byMuslims but also by
many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic
terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life.
They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated
conception:

. . .
the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a
direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit,
not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its
interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be
something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny
after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present
attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian
Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in
original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next. This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

The epitaph
on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be,
but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of
worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer
must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At
funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with
the Lord. In manycases,
this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make
be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the
bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this
world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that
death is annihilation. Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit?

In any case, it is the puerile conception
with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A
mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.)
But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a
thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a
conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I
am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with
puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic
candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in,
then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with
a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic
conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore
this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God
Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit
Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife
except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't
get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the
harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to
conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents
were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an
improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be
adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no
pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary
deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the
adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is
limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns you would not
get through to them. For what they need is not words and arguments; they need
to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is
distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to
shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we
adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led
astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things,
for example, so-called 'adultentertainment.' We don't read comic books, we
ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos
and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious
terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we
know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can
make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot
be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective. These, I
claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral
discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a
matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not
rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally
acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able,
employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that
transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who
are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no
sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.)
What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how
exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own
effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with
it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death,
and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will
have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my
selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a
mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest
that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the
self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the
'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then
the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it
can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The
existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of
eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring? Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Monday, September 30, 2013

I'm glad I lived, but I'm glad it's over. "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo) Once is enough.

I wish I'd never been born. Once is too much.

This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is, of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

I love this life and wish it didn't have to end. Once is not enough.

My view is the first. Suppose a representative of Governance appears to you at life's end. He says he has the power to grant you another go-round on the wheel of becoming: if you accept his offer you will repeat your life with every detail the same. Every detail! Including the detail of accepting the offer of Noch Einmal! (Think about what that entails.) I would say, "Hell no!," not again, not even once let alone endlessly. Up or out! Either up to a better state, or annihilation.

This life is preliminary and probationary; surely no end in itself. And if not preliminary and probationary, then meaningless. In this life were are in statu viae.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets. So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky. But I am not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day. It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge. But no more strange than the idea that death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1969 Is That All There Is?

Perhaps no other popular song achieves the depth of this Leiber and Stoller composition inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Wherein resides the dignity of the king? At every time in every possible game, the king is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on. He alone is 'necessary,' all other pieces are 'contingent.'

But at game's end, he too goes into the box with the lowliest of the pawns, as if to demonstrate that the high and mighty in life are equalized in death.

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation. The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death. Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion. This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.The earth's long conical shadow is full of soulsthat cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your deadand give them a little encouragementand help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after deathto the sweet home of pure oblivion.Each needs a little ship, a little shipand the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors. For this the Epicurean cure was concocted. In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown. This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment. Timor domini initium sapientiae. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10) A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who believed and feared that he would be judged by God. He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs. In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

Thursday, May 09, 2013

I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s. I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it. Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up. But we did speak briefly and I still recall his kindness and his words, "I'll help you any way I can." In the few minutes I was with him I became aware of his depth and his goodness.

My only serious engagement with Professor Willard's work was via a long and intricate paper I published in Philosophia Christi, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used. I expect Willard would approve of the following lines from St Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns. Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth. Life is hard, and death is uncertain. It may carry us away suddenly. In what state shall we leave this world? Where must we learn what we have neglected here? Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence? What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself? This too must be investigated.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain
tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I
tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or
annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this
vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever
in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest
in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!
It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding
cryonics and the transhumanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless. Some controversies reported here. But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in
Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first
choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in
case of a power outage.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

It was my good fortune to happen across Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies. From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles. I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end. It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings. I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo. The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through eyes filled with tears.

One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State. This is something contemporary liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider.

My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is. Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge. It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life. There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there. He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.

His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same? This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home. (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.

Or perchance to something worse? Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in. Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good. One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.

Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz. He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall. His dialectic was rooted in his life. His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.

Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are, in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.

Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings? I don't see that it does. What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life. What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.

What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):

Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live. We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily that of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious 'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no Last Judgment. Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late. (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.) We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig). The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now. One feels this to be especially so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY: I had been reading Origen before. Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things. That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory. This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN: Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy. I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime. Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip. The following from an interview with her:

The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.

So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.

It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.

To paraphrase Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't. Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report. Consider her first paragraph. She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs. Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object. Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification. No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics. Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence. How do I know I am not brain in a vat? If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty) that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real? The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?

The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold. Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain. We saw in an earlier post that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning. The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.

The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited. In the grip of that materialist framework assumption, he will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs. Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters. "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck." Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs. The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe. That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone. To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.

Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.

There is no proof of the afterlife. But there is evidence. Is the evidence sufficient? Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p. Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.

So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient. Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence? But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence. See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)

Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficent evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In manycases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

Two questions arise. Were Dr. Eben Alexander's experiences while in the coma state veridical? This question must be asked since the mere having of an experience is no guarantee of the reality of its object. The second question is whether the experiences, veridical or not, occurred wholly independently of brain functioning. The two questions are connected. If it could be shown that the experiences were generated by a minimally (mal)functioning brain, then then this would be a reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences. (Analogy: if I know that my unusual experiences are the result of the ingesting of LSD-25, then I have reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.) The author deals with these connected worries in the following passage:

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

Although I reject materialism about the mind and consider it reasonable to believe that conscious experiences do not require a physical substratum, and that it is possible to have such experiences in a disembodied state, I don't think the the author has proven that the possibility was actual in his case. For how does he know that his cortex was "simply off"? Failure to detect the functioning of the cortex does not entail that the cortex was not functioning. It might have been functioning below the detectability of the instruments and might have been generating the experiences all along.

A second concern of mine is this. How does Dr Alexander know that his wonderful experiences didn't suddenly arise just as the cortex was coming back into action just before his eyes popped open? So even if his cortex was for a long time completely nonfunctional, the experience he remembers could have been simply a dream that arose while the cortex was coming back 'on line.'

My point is not the the doctor has not given us evidence that mental functioning occurs in the absence of brain activity; I believe he has. My point is that the evidence is not compelling.

Our predicament in this life is such that we cannot prove such things as that God exists, that life has meaning, that the will is free, that morality is not an illusion, and that we survive our bodily deaths. But we cannot prove the opposites either. It is reasonable to maintain each of these views. Many arguments and considerations can be adduced. Among the evidence is a wide range of religious, mystical and paranormsl experiences including near-death and out-of-body experiences. The cumulative case is impressive but not conclusive. It rationalizes, but does not establish. Philosophers. of course, are ever in quest of 'knock-down' arguments. This is because you are no philosopher if you don't crave certainty. Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben! Husserl once exclaimed. But so far no 'knock-down' arguments have been found.

In the final analysis, lacking proof one way or the other, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.

I would add that the 'living' is more important than the 'believing.' It is far better to live in a manner to deserve immortality than to hold beliefs and give arguments about the matter.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Tomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean. When the young Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight. One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene. He died in 2010 at the age of 88. But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming? His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

My living body will become a dead body; I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body.

It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second premises, then one must say that both Bill and his living body will become a dead body, or that neither will. It seems that where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be. So also, it seems that where Bill used to be, a dead body will begin to be.

I don't see that the reader has refuted the argument. Yes, 'becomes' means the same in both premises.

Now the first premise is true: It is clear that one day my living body will undergo a radical change and become a dead body: the same body that today is alive will on a future date no longer have the property of being alive but will instead have the property of being dead. (I am assuming some 'normal' way of dying, as opposed to being instantaneously annihilated in a nuclear blast. More on this in a moment.) This is an alterational change: one and the same body will exist at different times in different states, first alive, then dead. So it is not the case, as the reader claims, that "where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be." That would be an existential change, not an alterational one. It is not the case that a dead body will begin to be; one and the same body will go from being alive to being dead.

The second premise is also true. When my body dies, I will cease to exist; but when my body dies it won't cease to exist: it will continue to exist for a while as a corpse. This is an existential change in me, not an alterational change: I will cease to exist. It is not the case that I will change in respect of the property of being alive.

Therefore, I cannot be identical to my living body. 'Will no longer exist' is true of me, but not true of my body.

"But what if you are annihilated in an explosion so that there is no corpse?" At this point the argument takes a modal turn. Even if my body does not continue to exist after I cease to exist, it could; but it is not possible that I continue to exist after I cease to exist. So again we have a difference in properties and non-identity.

I have been assuming mortalism, the doctrine that I cease to exist when my body dies. If mortalism is false, and I exist even after the death of my body, then a fortiori I am not identical to my living body.

Friday, September 21, 2012

I just breezed through a quick first reading of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (Twelve, 2012). The slim volume ends with some fragmentary notes of characteristic wit scribbled near the end. My favorites:

Amazing how heart and lungs have held up: would have been healthier if I'd been more sickly. (88)

I'm not fighting or battling cancer -- it's fighting me. (89)

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't [can?] run away from. (89)

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. (91)

Larkin good on fear in "Aubade," with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either. (92)

Friday, August 10, 2012

The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained. Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.

If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable. But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both. And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies.

Friday, July 27, 2012

We are concerned that life is short and that its end approaches. But there is consolation in the contrary thought that we are getting through this life, that a time will come when we can lay down its burdens of pain, disappointment, ignorance, and moral failure. The end is the end of the goods of this life but also the end of its evils. And this whether the end is final or a new beginning.

So death, where is thy sting? If this world is but a shadow-play of phenomena, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; if all the world's a stage in the theater of the absurd, then to be quit of it is no great loss. But if it is prelude, then new adventures await and you can look forward to them. To live well one must hope, both in this life and beyond it.

But suppose you believe that this world is ultimately real, and that life in it is unqualifiedly good. Then you have a problem. For then death is a great calamity: it deprives you irrevocably of the ultimate in reality and value.

The solution to the problem is to abandon the twin presupposition that this world is the ne plus ultra of being and value and that life in it is unqualifiedly good. There are fairly weighty reasons for both abandonments.

What I don't understand is the attitude of Philip Larkin on Death. He seems in the grip of the twin presupposition.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul -- or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever -- dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life, Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11)

If everybody knows this, then everybody believes it. But the suicide bomber doesn't believe it as his behavior attests. So it is not the case that everybody knows that the soul dies with the body.

If it were the case, radical Islam would not pose the terrible threat it poses. The commies of the Evil Empire, good materialists that they were, could be threatened with nuclear annihililation should they wax aggressive in their scheme of world domination. Not so the Islamists.

This world is a vanishing quantity. I am glad soon to be quit of it. It has nothing to offer in the end but bagatelles that can fool only the foolish and must leave the wise unsatisfied. Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas.

Fool:

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wise man:

Clever verse from a drunken fool to be admired by adolescents. It amounts to:

Do not go gentle from this dark Cave,Old age should cherish its lack of sight:But rage, rage against the gaining of the Light.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

I go back and forth on this question. I should be ashamed of myself. Forty years a philosopher and no fixed view on such a fundamental question? What am I (not) being paid to do? To gain some clarity, I will sketch some possible views. I will also sketch the view to which I incline (despite my vacillation).

But first I define 'mortalist.' A mortalist is someone who holds that we human beings are mortal, i.e., subject to the natural necessity of dying, both in body and in mind. Accordingly, all human beings will eventually die, and when they do they will utterly cease to exist as individuals, even if they persist for a while after death as corpses or as smoke and ashes. (By the way, I consider transhumanist dreams of immortality here below to be the worst sort of self-deluding, ultra-hubristic sci-fi nonsense. Pox and anathema be upon this house of cards.) For the mortalist, then, as I define the term, there is no natural immortality, as in Platonism, nor any supernatural immortality via divine agency as in Christianity.

A. Views According to which Death is not an Evil

1. The first view, that of the pessimistic mortalist, we can label 'Silenian.' On this view, death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is, of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

Better never to have been born, but here we are. So second best is to die as soon as possible. Death is not an evil, but a good, since it releases us from an evil condition, that of being alive.

2. The second view is that of Epicurus. On the Epicurean view, death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not. My being dead is not an evil state of affairs for me (though it may be for others) because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead. There is no such STOA because when I am dead there is no bearer of the property of being dead. And there being no such STOA entails that it it cannot be an evil STOA, or a good one for that matter.

I must point out that some find this reasoning sophistical. Well, if it is, is is not obviously sophistical. Some of the complexities of the reasoning are explored in a number of posts collected in the Death and Immortality and Epicureanism categories. I can't go into this now since this post is mainly just taxonomic.

The Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil. It is not evil because it is axiologically neutral. The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The Silenian pessimist renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole: it's no good; better never to have been born, with second best being to die young. By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died.

3. Platonism. For the Silenian, death is not evil because it releases one from life, which is evil. For the Epicurean death is not evil because the decedent is nonexistent, hence removed from all goods and evils. One cannot experience loss, or suffer in any way, if one does not exist. On the Platonic view death is also not an evil but for a different reason: death is release of the naturally immortal soul (the person in his essence) from embodiment. From a sub-standard 'cave-like' existence, the soul is freed to enjoy a true existence. On Platonism, the true self continues to exist post mortem in better conditions.

4. Illusionism. Whether or not actually held by anyone, there is the possible view according to which dying and being dead are illusions. If so, then how can they be evil? The enlightened sage sees through the veil of maya and recognizes his true identity as the deathless Atman (=Brahman). We don't exist as separate individuals and we don't die as separate individuals. I am the eternal Atman, and as such deathless. Moksha, enlightenment, liberation, is to realize my identity with the eternal Atman thereby seeing through the illusion of separateness. For some puzzles relating to moksha, see here.

5. The view to which I incline. Although the process of dying for most of us won't be easy, physically or mentally, the evil of dying is outweighed by the good of being dead, the good of being released from a predicament which is plainly unsatisfactory, whether or not we survive our bodily deaths as individuals. One aspect of the unsatisfactoriness of our present predicament -- and it is indeed a predicament -- is our deep ignorance, an ignorance that in some takes the form of delusion. (We are de-luded, played for fools, by a world which obtrudes itself upon us as the ne plus ultra of reality when calm reflection shows that it can be no such thing.)

If you deny that this life is plainly unsatisfactory, and can in the end offer us nothing that truly satisfies, then you live on a different planet and I can't help you except to refer you to Buddha, and the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, and Plato, and Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis, and Schopenhauer, and a thousand other philosophers and sages East and West.

Mine is not the position of the pessimistic mortalist, the Silenian, because I am neither an out-and-out pessimist nor a mortalist. Life is not thoroughly bad, but a mixture of good and bad, a chiaroscuro of axiological light and shade if you will. It's not all night and fog; there is daybreak and sunshine and thus intimations of Elsewhere. And if this life is a vale of soul-making, as I am inclined to think, then it is instrumentally good.

Mine is not the Epicurean position because I am not a mortalist.

Mine is not the Platonic position because I do not dogmatically affirm the immortality of the soul. (By 'Platonic' I do not mean the actual views of Plato, whatever they were, but something much broader and caricature-like.) I maintain merely that belief in it is rationally acceptable. The rationality of the belief supports the hope that we may come to learn in death what we cannot learn in life. On this view death is not an evil but an adventure into Shakespeare's "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." (Hamlet's soliloquy.) Death is an adventure, and one to be embraced and prepared for, given that one has perceived that this world has nothing much to offer us.

The poet and drunkard Dylan Thomas had it exactly wrong when he advised not going gently into that good night but raging, raging against the dying of the light. I liked his famous lines (which I did not just now quote but paraphrase) when I was an adolescent, but I have put aside childish things.

Peter Lupu once asked me why, if I believe that being dead is good insofar as it is a release from this unsatisfactory predicament, I take such good care of myself. My answer follows from what I have said. This vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making. So I need to 'do my time.' (Here, in nuce, is an argument against suicide.) I need more time here below to earn merit and make up for earlier transgressions. I need more time to complete my philosophical projects and prepare for death. No reasonable person embarks upon a long journey to a foreign land, there to take up permanent residence, without adequate preparations. How foolish, then, not to prepare for the journey to Shakespeare's "undisovered country"? You say there is no such "undiscovered country"? Well, then you need to inquire into the grounds of your belief. Or do you hold beliefs about matters of the utmost importance thoughtlessly?

B. Views According to Which Death is an Evil

6. Optimistic Mortalism. Death is an evil because life is unqualifiedly good and death deprives us of it. Does this need refutation?

7. Christian Mortalism. Death is an evil because we were intended to live in an embodied state forever in paradise with God. But now we are under sentence of death due to Adam's sin. Death was not intended by God but is a punishment for Adam's sin. Death, though an evil, is yet a portal to eternal life for those who accept Jesus as savior. So Chrisitan mortalism is not mortalism full-strength as I defined it at the outset, but a mitigated mortalism which pins its hopes on supernatural divine agency and the resurrection of the body.

Friday, June 29, 2012

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment. Before, indeed, he fancied that he could be happy there; but when he arrived there, he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.

One might even go so far as to say that heaven would be hell for the worldly person. And what the worldly person imagines heaven to be might reveal itself as hell, as in the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit.

I see that London Ed has some thoughts on the topic. I agree with him that 'the objection from boredom' is no good. I'm never bored here, why should I be bored there? Never bored here, only tired. But that's due to the bag of bones and guts that makes up my samsaric vehicle. Free of crass embodiment, things might well be different on the far side.

You say I'm speculating? True enough, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

Must not the materialist, the mortalist hope that bodily death is the absolute end as death draws near? For he has lived as if it is. He has made no provision for anything else. He has decided that this life is all there is and has lived accordingly. He hopes he is in for no surprise. If he has lived in ways commonly regarded as evil, in the manner of a Saddam Hussein, say, surely he hopes that in the end there is no good and evil but only flimsy and fleeting human opinions.

So the mortalist too has his hope. He hopes for annihilation at death. He does not, after all, know that he is slated for annihilation. So he must hope. He has faith and hope. And love? He loves this world so much that he cannot allow even the possibility of another to distract his love.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only byMuslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

. . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In manycases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated, conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not untoutter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of eternal life.

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul -- or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever -- dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life, Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heineggholds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness, accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:

1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied consciousness in a variety of ways.

Therefore

2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it has while embodied.

Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied. For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of conscousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it. One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith -- or unfaith.

Friday, April 20, 2012

The de Gaulles had a daughter, Anne, afflicted with Down syndrome. De Gaulle adored her, but as often happens in such cases, Anne died young. At her graveside when the service was over, de Gaulle turned to his wife and said: “Come. Now she is like the others.”